Getting Back Up, V: Luck, Departing

I lost my sense of purpose. Giving up my trust of the Universe, the Universe stopped directing me. It started dragging me on my face. And that trust on my part was replaced with rage. Rage at the Universe for hurting me, for hobbling me, for destroying my joy.

That rage, I couldn’t shake it off for much of the decade. I started to reframe, so slowly, but the desire to reframe takes years. The ability to reframe takes more. That reframing takes another few years to gain power before it’s ready for use. Part of that reframing was the subtle movement of the image of the Morrigan, overlaying over the Universe. Replacing the toxic, adversarial image I was carrying in my gut.

But even that wasn’t enough. Life had to KNOCK the wind out of my routine of avoidance before that reframing could finally fall into place and get working.

The Universe doesn’t always knock gently. For every gentle nudge in the right direction granted one person, another person makes one wrong move and pays with their life. And for every serendipity visited upon one, another finds misfortune they have no say in. Did I deserve the luck visited upon me? I don’t like the word “deserve”. I’m no more deserving than any of the people whose lives are a long furrow of uninterrupted misery. But I’m learning to trust that whatever misery, whatever reward I get, I’m supposed to do something with it. Not bask in its awesomeness. Not gloat about how deserving I am, or how much I did to earn it. But use it, live it, trust it, build on it, share it with others. And living it requires new learning, learning that requires me to learn how to balance all over again. There's no way to embark on that learning without falling down some. So when it’s time to learn something new—be it learning how to live with more compassion, or learning the next leg of my path, or learning a new skill, I know it’s going to mean the Universe will knock me on my face.

And it did. It took my car away from me. That’s when years of reframing could finally take hold. That’s when the trust started to creep back in. And that’s when the Universe started directing me again.

But the biggest change I could make was learning how to trust the Universe to make the big changes. And 99% of the rest of the work offered no improvement, no results. That too was a lesson in cultivating trust.